‘Tomato’, the only Paiute word in Chinuk Wawa

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I only know of one word from the Uto-Aztecan language family being used in Chinook Jargon.

By this, I mean a word coming from a Pacific NW tribal language belonging to that family.

Crushing-the-rose-hips-by-Tashia-Hart-1-1024x699

‘Rose hips’ also means ‘tomatoes’ in Ojibwe (image credit: Indian Giver)

And it’s got to be a pretty recent loan, because it’s the word for a recently introduced item, ‘tomato(es)’:

c’hápa

This word is used in Grand Ronde (Oregon) Chinuk Wawa.

The dictionary (CTGR 2012) attributes this to a “Warm Springs” usage meaning ‘rose hips’.

That could implicate any of 3 unrelated Indigenous languages as the source:

  1. Kiksht (Upper Chinookan),
  2. Sahaptin, or
  3. Northern Paiute.

No similar form turned up when I researched this in Chinookan and Sahaptin languages.

I haven’t found materials specifically on Warm Springs Paiute, but in closely related Paiute languages, ‘rose hips’ is similar to c’hápa:

The phonetic details aren’t known to me yet, to explain how (t)siabui would’ve become pronounced as c’haba. But I’ve noticed that there’s at least a bit of word-sharing between Paiute and Sahaptin, such as a word for ‘valerian’.

So maybe ‘rose hips’ got loaned from Paiute to Sahaptin and/or Kiksht in the new, ethnically mixed Warm Springs reservation community from the Paiutes’ 1879 arrival onwards.

Kiksht Chinookan would have been likely to use its “sound symbolism” habits to make the initial /ts/ sound into an ejective, such as we find in the Jargon word.

That 1879 date is another indication of the newness of this word, seeing as how the Jargon had already existed for about a century…

Maybe after that, c’haba entered the locally vital Chinuk Wawa?

Bonus fact:

The word ‘tomato(es)’ shows up loaned into some PNW languages, and it too is from a Uto-Aztecan language, specifically from Nahuatl of Mexico.

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?

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